‘Pathetic’ or a maniac bent on preserving ‘honour’? Jury in Peer Khairi murder trial set to start deliberations

Jury in Peer Khairi murder trial set to start deliberations

Peer Khairi is either a “sad, even pathetic man” who unintentionally killed his wife while in the throes of major depression, or a furious husband who committed murder to preserve his family’s Muslim honour.

These are the two starkly divergent theories available to 11 Superior Court jurors — down from the traditional 12, after one was discharged for persistent illness — as they prepare to begin deliberations Thursday in the second-degree murder trial of the Afghan immigrant.

In closing submissions, lawyers for the defence and Crown recounted the grisly details of Randjida Khairi’s fatal stabbing, and offered conflicting assumptions on motive and intent. There is no doubt Mr. Khairi killed his wife, slashing her throat so deeply that knife glanced her spine. But in calling for a manslaughter conviction, defence lawyer Christopher Hicks said his client’s mind was clouded by mental illness and incapable of forming murderous intent.

Mr. Hicks issued a tall order to the four-woman, seven-man jury: “In coming to a just and fair verdict concerning the death of Randjida Khairi, it is essential to approach the issues in a rational and dispassionate manner,” he said Wednesday, a month after the court began hearing evidence on how the frail 53-year-old, sick with tuberculosis and epilepsy and weighing just 86 pounds, drowned in her own blood inside the family’s cockroach-infested Etobicoke apartment.

What Peer Khairi intended to do that day was crystal clear

The Crown attributes her death to a clash of cultures that began when the family, originally from Afghanistan, immigrated to Canada in 2003 after more than a decade in India. Mr. Khairi was allegedly enraged at his wife’s newfound desire for equal rights and her support for their children’s increasingly Westernized behaviour, including late-night dates and non-Muslim dress.

“What Peer Khairi intended to do that day was crystal clear,” Crown attorney Robert Kenny told the court. “He intended to kill the wife who had defied him, to kill the wife who was responsible for his children turning against his wishes, to kill the woman who had decided to leave him.”

The defence vehemently rejected the notion, attributing the crime to a temporary loss of self-control. If jurors indeed remain “rational and dispassionate,” Mr. Hicks said, they will see Mr. Khairi as he truly was: “Not a dominating figure seeking to impose his will and values on his wife and six children, but in reality, a sad, even pathetic figure — an elderly man, an immigrant, alone and friendless, completely illiterate, of low-to-moderate intelligence at best; isolated by a total inability to master the English language and with few marketable skills, unable to obtain employment and to support his family as he had always done in the past.”

Mr. Khairi, now 65, exhibited symptoms of major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, the latter brought on by a rocket attack in Kabul, the court heard. Compounded by “resettlement stress” in Canada, Mr. Hicks suggested, these “demons” ultimately affected his self-control, making him quicker to anger.

According to the defence theory, on March 18, 2008, the victim lunged at the accused with a knife while uttering “a stream of invective” — insults so horrid they simply could not be tolerated.

“Peer Khairi had completely lost control and reacted in the heat of passion with such a frenzied attack on Randjida that many details… were obliterated from his memory,” Mr. Hicks said. (This blackout, he theorized, could explain why Mr. Khairi gave dramatically disparate accounts of the crime to police, doctors and finally the court.)

Nonsense, said the Crown.

Not a dominating figure seeking to impose his will and values on his wife and six children, but in reality, a sad, even pathetic figure

In all their past fights — despite all the previous “heinous insults” wife had flung at husband — he never lost control, “not one bit.” The accused claimed to be overcome by fear when the victim lunged at him, Mr. Kenny noted, yet he calmly testified to the manner in which he overpowered Randjida Khairi, threw her to the bed, throttled her unconscious and stabbed her repeatedly. He said he acted in self-defence, yet there was no evidence of any struggle.

Look at the splash of blood on the wall in forensic photos, Mr. Kenny instructed the jury. The high-pressure spray, he said, reveals Mr. Khairi slit his wife’s throat, slicing through skin, muscle and voicebox, stopping only when he hit bone; he then stabbed her torso five times with a smaller knife and held her down as she silently died.

Rational and dispassionate as they must be, jurors will remember this — remember all four weeks of this — as they begin deliberations on Mr. Khairi’s fate.

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